He was a working-class Irish kid from LeBreton Flats, kicked out of school (misbehaviour) at age 15 or 16. Thomas Ahearn didn’t look like a young man who would give Ottawa electric light.

But he did. And he gave it telephones. And streetcars (electric railway, in the words of the time.) And a factory that built streetcars. And Britannia Park at one end of the streetcar line (so that people would ride the streetcars on weekends) and an amusement park in Rockcliffe (same reason.)

Also a bridge. The city needed one, he felt, so he took out a personal loan to get construction started on the stalled Champlain Bridge. Didn’t even get it named after himself, unlike the companies that underwrite hockey palaces today.

On Aug. 15, the city will unveil a rebuilt monument to Ahearn at Lansdowne Park, near the corner of Bank Street and Holmwood Avenue, honouring him for bringing a streetcar line down Bank in the early 1900s. It replaces a memorial fountain that broke down years ago.

Not bad for a school dropout from a poor neighbourhood.

But in one crucial sense the kid with the wrong start had a better beginning than any school in Ottawa could have given him.

Thomas Ahearn, mayor Thomas Birkett, city coucil members and other guests take the first street car to Ottawa’s Exhibition Grounds, 1891.

City of Ottawa Archives

Born in 1855, Thomas Ahearn entered adulthood in the golden age of the telegraph. And there was no better way to learn about telegraphs than by going to New York City and working at Western Union, a hotbed of invention.

It was a natural launching place for the technological revolutionaries of the day, workplace of Thomas Edison, among others. There’s no record that Ahearn ever met Edison, but he soaked up the same creative atmosphere.

“It was like going to Microsoft now” as a teenager, says Anna Adamek, a historian specializing in technology at the Canada Science and Technology Museum. She has a soft spot for Ahearn and his business partner, Warren Soper.

“Because they were a success story,” she says. “We have lots of failure stories,” but these young men overcame great odds and fought off competitors like Ontario Hydro and Bell to build Ottawa’s networks of electrical and telephone wires.

And besides, the man had a sense of style in everything he built. It was new technology, but old-fashioned craftsmanship.

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Ahearn came back to Ottawa when he was about 20, working for the Great North Western Telegraph Company. But a few years later, in 1879, he and his friend and partner Soper got a contract to install telegraph sets across the country for the Canadian Pacific Railway.

Adamek says this was their big break, giving them enough capital to set up shop on their own by 1882 as electrical contractors, though the telegraph was still their main business. (Their office sign is at the museum.)

That’s when Ahearn and Soper made some smart business moves.

First smart move: As the world was fiddling with direct current (DC) and arc lights, the two Ottawa youngsters settled on alternating current (AC) and incandescent bulbs, which are more durable and easier to maintain.

“It’s 1882 that they are able to recognize that that’s the future, and really nobody else is (recognizing it) at that point. At that time, they had the only incandescent bulb in Ottawa.” They lent it to a university physics lab.

Second good decision: They got a federal charter instead of a municipal one, letting them operate in Quebec and Ontario, and also shielding them against municipal politics when Ottawa wanted to break their monopoly later.

Third decision: They linked up with powerful politicians, first guys like Erskine Bronson, who was both an MPP and president of a small electric power company that merged with Ahearn and Soper; later Wilfrid Laurier and Mackenzie King. Ahearn’s daughter married into the powerful Southam family, former owners of the Citizen.

Over the years, various companies were formed; some merged with competitors to form new ones, and the final form looks like this:

• Ottawa Electric Railway Company, from 1894. (It ran streetcars).

• Ottawa Car Company. (It made streetcars and locomotives, and survived in various forms until 1947).

• Ahearn Electric Heating and Manufacturing Co. built heaters.

• Ottawa Electric Company, also from 1894 (which had a monopoly on commercial and residential lighting in the city.)

By 1895, his empire made small appliances and control devices, distributed Westinghouse products, and Ahearn himself ran the Ottawa offices of Bell Telephone.

And his showmanship? Historian Adamek’s research shows he invited Ottawa’s elite to an “electric banquet” in 1892. The whole meal was cooked on electric appliances and delivered to the Windsor Hotel dining room on a streetcar.

He drove an electric car. He participated in the first transatlantic phone call, made by Mackenzie King to Britain (1927).

“They make Ottawa into the image of an electric paradise,” says Adamek. “Ottawa is trying to reinvent itself. It’s not a lumber town anymore. It’s the capital.” But that’s a bit dull. Electricity, now! That’s the future, that’s progress.

They brought electric light to the House of Commons in 1883, a year before the U.S. capitol was “electrified.” But curiously Ahearn and Soper left the Senate dark at the time. Go ahead, make your own jokes.

The funny thing is that while Ahearn’s legacy is all around us, the records of his work are astonishingly thin.

That’s because his family burned them after he died. The city took over the Ahearn-Soper empire in 1947 to form Ottawa Hydro and the Ottawa Transportation Commission (today’s OC Transpo), and the family didn’t want to turn over the historic records.

Still, Adamek carefully showed the Citizen some artifacts from his early career, preserved at the museum: A telegraph key, a little tool kit that 1870s linemen would carry to repair telegraph wires, other small devices. Many are carefully carved, bevelled, varnished.

“That was very important to both men. Everything was done beautifully. They experimented with new ways of doing things, but they also really cared about the look, the esthetics.”

In his later years, Ahearn shifted into finance and served as first chairman of the Federal District Commission, predecessor of the National Capital Commission.

He died in 1938. But first he went back to school in his 70s, finishing a university degree that had escaped him more than half a century earlier.

Telegraph operators key. Thomas Ahearn, who brought electricity and phone service to Ottawa and also created the streetcar system (or “electric railway”) all starting in the late 1800s.

Pat McGrath /
Ottawa Citizen

Line mans repair kit. Thomas Ahearn, who brought electricity and phone service to Ottawa and also created the streetcar system (or “electric railway”) all starting in the late 1800s.

Pat McGrath /
Ottawa Citizen

Galvanometer. Thomas Ahearn, who brought electricity and phone service to Ottawa and also created the streetcar system (or “electric railway”) all starting in the late 1800s.

Pat McGrath /
Ottawa Citizen

Relay. Thomas Ahearn, who brought electricity and phone service to Ottawa and also created the streetcar system (or “electric railway”) all starting in the late 1800s.

Pat McGrath /
Ottawa Citizen

Thomas Ahearn, who brought electricity and phone service to Ottawa and also created the streetcar system (or “electric railway”) all starting in the late 1800s.

Pat McGrath /
Ottawa Citizen

Thomas Ahearn, who brought electricity and phone service to Ottawa and also created the streetcar system (or “electric railway”) all starting in the late 1800s.

Pat McGrath /
Ottawa Citizen

Interior of a streetcar at the Museum of Science and Technology. Thomas Ahearn, who brought electricity and phone service to Ottawa and also created the streetcar system (or “electric railway”) all starting in the late 1800s.

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